“What does your mom do for a living?”
“She’s a rabbi.”
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“Oh, you’re Jewish?”
“Yes.”
And then the conversation ends, or goes on for many minutes.
It’s funny how quickly conversations like those can end, and how long they can go on.
I grew up in a kosher household, going to temple regularly and learning Hebrew and eventually teaching Hebrew… sitting in the shadow of “My Mother The Rabbi.”
Although I currently have a good relationship with my mom, I used have major qualms with her career title, and the things that come with it.
My mom has been a rabbi for over twenty years- she even has an honorary doctorate. Our congregation loves her, she enjoys her job, she’s great at what she does.
I have not been great at appreciating what she does.
Here’s why:
There are things that people expect when you tell them you’re the child of a religious leader: a large expansive knowledge of everything in the religion, the capability to explain the beliefs of said religion, and in this case, a mastery of the language in which Hebrew scripture was written.
Gentiles typically are simply curious and require long explanations in colloquial terms, and when I explain that I don’t know all the details to the whole answer for their questions I’ve been able to satisfy them with what my mom jokingly calls “Rabbi Google.”
However, for people within the Jewish community, discovering what my mother does for a living is not a novelty. From experience some of them know what to expect: the children of rabbis either rebel entirely against their parent’s religious ideals, or revel in their culture and submerge themselves in temple activities.
Yet I have mainly fallen between those two things, so I don’t quite meet their expectations. As a child I resented being taken to Friday night services: they were long, and boring, and I had to listen to my mom talk for hours, which I felt like I experienced enough of at home- what an unkind thing to think.
Within the years prior to my Bat Mitzvah, my resentment towards my mother grew: I had to come to temple on Friday nights for services, Wednesday night Hebrew school, Sunday morning religious school, and spend hours pouring over what I was meant to read during my Bat Mitzvah service. I was horribly rude to my mom in front of my peers who were also studying in preparation for their B’nai Mitzvot (coming of age ceremonies, typically for 13-year-olds). My classmates’ view of me shifted from having perceived me to be an intelligent, kind person to a snarky, ungrateful brat. My friends from school got earfuls of how much I loathed going to temple and studying for my Bat Mitzvah; thus they developed the idea that I hated my mom and the people in my community. In actuality, I was just extremely stressed and overwhelmed and I blamed my mother for all of the pressure I felt, and as a preteen, I didn’t know how to go about expressing my distress.
After my Bat Mitzvah, I didn’t immediately dive into trying to repair my relationship with My Mother The Rabbi. I continued to avoid going to temple and complain about attending religious school on Sundays. I was so disrespectful to my ever-tolerant-of-my-shenanigans parent, as I had yet to change perspectives and see things from my mom’s point of view.
She hadn’t wanted me to feel pressured, she wanted me to succeed in front of our synagogue. She always wants me to succeed: that is her main expectation of me, as her child.
I faltered under the weight of others’ questions, and dangled from the precipices of their expectations, and because I didn’t know how to handle those things and I didn’t turn to my mom for help, my relationship with her was tarnished for years.
I’ve learned that her being a rabbi means that I will always be a part of our Jewish community, and that people are going to be curious or stereotyping regardless of whether or not they know what my parents do for work. Growing up is hard: I failed to communicate what I was feeling to my mother and it created a domino effect in our relationship.
Over time, we’ve been bridging the gap that my younger self-created.
Her title is not a burden for me the way it used to be, but she will always be My Mother The Rabbi.
